Looking for confirmations of this dream, confessions of a dreamer…

After you have read through this section (Урок 1 – Немного о себе) in your Golosa Textbook, and listened to the corresponding audio files (found here), then you can move on to the next bits of homework, seen below.

Now for Review…

Go through the following lessons on Learn Russian Step by Step to make sure you fully grasp the sounds for the Russian alphabet. No worries, these are short and it’s very easy to complete these in one sitting.

Next, you’ll go to another site for review, this will be utilizing the website RussianFORfree.com. Each of the lessons listed includes a short quiz at the end to help reinforce the knowledge. Since these help as a review the quiz should be helpful. These pages also teach you a bit more about the rules associated with each letter.

More Homework…

The Story of Эрик

Read the text silently as you listen to the recording. The Russian words in context will help you match up the new Russian letters with their sounds.

Эрик Кац was born in Даллас in the штат of Техас, but after high школа, he became a студент in a small колледж in Нью-Йорк. His main интерес was Russian area studies, and he was fascinated by everything having to do with Россия: as a freshman, he signed up forкурсы in русская литература, история, политология, география, философия, музыка, and культура. He read all the Russian классики: Пушкин, Достоевский, Толстой, and Чехов.

Эрик also took courses in русский язык. To practice his русский язык, Эрик visited all sorts of русские вебсайты on the Интернет. There he read русские журналы and газеты, listened to русское радио and watched русское телевидение. He also rented lots of русские видеофильмы.

Эрик was especially interested in русская история, from the time of the all-powerful цари, like Пётр I through the период of коммунизм under Soviet rulers such as Ленин, Сталин, Хрущёв, and Брежнев to those under whom Россия moved towards the West: Горбачёв,Ельцин, and Путин.

In his senior year, Эрик traveled to Россия and spent the семестр in Москва, Санкт-Петербург, Волгоград, and Воронеж. After the spring семестр ended in май, Эрик left Россия and spent all summer – all июнь, июль, and август traveling around Центральная Азия. In countries as remote as Казахстан, Узбекистан, Таджикистан, and even far-off Кыргызстан, Эрик found that he could communicate with just about everyone using his русский язык.

Before leaving Россия, Эрик invited his new friend Анна to visit him in Америка. Эрик wanted Анна to see Даллас, where his мама, папа, and сестра lived. And of course, Анна wanted to travel all around the США: from Бостон to Вашингтон, from Чикаго to Атланта andМайами, and then on to Хьюстон, Лос-Анджелес, Сан-Франциско, and Сиэтл.

After returning to Америка, and after Анна came to visit, Эрик finished his studies and considered a future карьера, perhaps as a журналист or a профессор or as a бизнес-консультант for firms dealing with Россия and Центральная Азия. With his solid knowledge ofрусский язык and русская культура, Эрик knew that he would find many opportunities.

“The Russian words in the following list are all written with the Cyrillic alphabet but if you read them carefully, one word at a time, from top to bottom beginning at the top of the left-hand column, by the time you reach the final word in the lower right-hand corner, you will know the Cyrillic alphabet (as well as a few Russian words). Use the Greek letters you may already know to help.”*

To start things off… You need to make an account on Memrise.com and either use the web version or download the app. As you start this endeavor/series, there is one course in particular which is the best way I have found so far to learn the alphabet, and it will transition you into learning vocabulary, it’s called “Learn Basic Russian“.

Depending on how serious you are about learning Russian, you may want to buy keyboard stickers and install the appropriate language pack so you can type in Russian (rather than constantly going through Google translate, which is a bit irritating if you do it a lot).

Russian/English Keyboard

After you have read through this section (Алфавит) in your Golosa Textbook, and listened to the corresponding audio files (found here), then you can move on to the next bits of homework, seen below.

I use the textbook Golosa, Book 1. I have scoured the internets and as far as I can tell this is the #1 textbook used in Russian language classrooms in Universities across the US.

I don’t have a copy of the Student Activities Manual and I am not in any class right now so I have turned my efforts toward the world wide web to find supplementary materials. I am not always the most organized so I figured placing it on this blog would help keep everything together as I move along since I have so many resources to pull from.

You, the reader, can follow along if you like and feel free to leave comments.